Strangled - Brian McGrory [87]
The second-floor landing was neither better nor brighter. Think of a men’s room in a highway rest area, only this place smelled worse — a roundish, biting, aggressive odor that seemed to reach right into your nostrils and hit the back of your eyes. If hopelessness had a smell, this was it.
The hallway was longer than I thought it would be. If there had ever been carpet laid down, it wasn’t there now. Instead, the floors appeared to be made of scratched and grooved particle-board, stained in various shapes and sizes and colors. The dingy walls hadn’t been painted since the Republicans and Democrats in Washington all got along. I could hear the tinny sound of cheap televisions and radios, and was picking up the fumes of cigarettes. All in all, not a pleasant place.
“This feels like my old college frat house,” Vinny whispered to me.
“I had no idea you went to college,” I whispered back.
He ignored that and motioned for me to follow him toward the rear of the house. We passed several dark, old-fashioned doors, some with numbers on them, others not. The floors creaked, the air reeked, and it kept getting darker the farther back we walked.
Mongillo stopped in front of the last door on the right. It had the metal number 7 on it, and you could see the outlines of where the 2 used to be but wasn’t anymore.
I put my fist next to the door, waited for Mongillo to nod, and I knocked, twice softly, then three times firmly. We both stood and listened intently in the dark.
Nothing.
Well, at least nothing from behind this particular door. Down the hall, we heard a bolt get pushed into a lock. We heard a television set get turned down. We heard someone urgently dragging an unknown object across an unseen floor. And then we heard nothing at all.
I looked at Mongillo. He nodded back at me. I knocked, even louder this time, four firm raps with the side of my right fist.
Another lock turned down the hallway. Someone somewhere fell into a coughing, wheezing, hacking fit. A fly buzzed between our two heads.
But again, nothing from this unseen room.
I said, loud enough to be heard inside, “Mr. Vasco. Are you there? Mr. Vasco?”
The sound of my voice bounced off the bare hallway walls and melted into the hazy darkness. If Mr. Paul Vasco was indeed inside, as he was supposed to be, then he was either an incredibly sound sleeper, or he had no designs on entertaining visitors right about now.
I put my hand on the knob and began to turn it slowly. Mongillo squinted at me like I was some sort of maniacal nut, but did nothing to stop me. The knob, to my surprise, kept turning, turning, sliding all the way to the right. Just as it got to the end and I was about to slowly push it open, a latch opened across the hall and the door matter-of-factly swung open.
Vinny and I whirled around simultaneously. I half expected to be shot right between the eyes, gunned down in my own cold blood in a dingy halfway house on the fringes of Charlestown while I was in hot pursuit of the most befuddling story of my otherwise stellar career.
There was no gunfire, though, not even the flick of a knife. Instead, a voice from inside the darkened room called out, “You looking for me?”
It was a voice that was at once gravelly yet pointed, weary yet strong — the voice of someone who was energized by his newfound freedom, yet at some deeper level not quite sure, after all these years in prison, how to handle it all.
I asked, “Are you Paul Vasco?”
Still the person didn’t appear. Vinny and I were staring at the darkened, open doorway the way Dorothy looked at the stage that supposedly held Oz.
“Who the fuck are you?”
That was the voice, not Dorothy.
I replied, “Sir, may we talk to you in private?”
That inquiry was followed by a spate of silence, which was followed by the sounds of footsteps and the